Dr. Joe Duffy
Professor of Social Work and Inclusion and Fellow of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queen's University Belfast
Dr. Joe Duffy created and spearheaded the idea for this Peace Summit in early 2024. He is Professor of Social Work and Inclusion at Queen’s University Belfast and Academic Lead for the Queen’s and Belmont University partnership. Dr. Duffy was the recipient of an All-Disciplines Fulbright Scholarship in 2018-19, a first in the discipline of social work for over 50 years. During his Fulbright Scholarship he worked with colleagues at New York University and Belmont University, focusing on introducing lived experiences and stories of trauma, mental ill-health, disability and homelessness into the classroom. Dr. Duffy’s specialist focus, built on his extensive pedagogic research with victims and survivors of ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, enabled him to work closely with survivors from the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. One student described this as ‘probably one of the most powerful learning experiences I have had at NYU’. Dr. Duffy also led the first research study examining the experiences of social workers during ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland (Duffy, Campbell & Tosone, 2019), followed in 2020 by the Routledge edited collection ‘International Perspectives on Social Work and Political Conflict.’ His current research includes leading the first ‘Curricular Guide on Service User Involvement in Social Work Education’ for the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), the sole regulator for social work in the United States. This work is due for completion in the Autumn of 2025 and will apply to all CSWE regulated social work education settings across the United States.